Astana, 10 November. The programme provides for the possibility of handing part of the pension assets managed by the National Bank to private investment portfolio managers (IPMs) on a competitive basis.
By 2030, 20–30% of pension assets should be under private management against zero in 2025, says the Capital Market Development Programme for 2026–2030.
The present picture, by the programme’s data: about 99.7% of pension assets, more than 24 trillion tenge or about 17% of GDP, are managed by the National Bank. The portfolio is 61% government securities, 22.5% corporate bonds and 12% shares. The law lets contributors hand their savings to IPM management, up to 100% from 2026, but private managers hold only about 0.3% of the assets, or about 88.6 billion tenge. The Unified Accumulative Pension Fund (UAPF) meanwhile collects contributions, keeps individual accounts and organises payouts, while investment policy and the main part of the assets are set by the National Bank.
An IPM is a licensed company that, for a fee, manages money on a contributor’s instruction; the abbreviation comes from “investment portfolio manager”. The programme proposes not waiting for contributors to choose managers one by one: the National Bank could hand parts of its portfolio to licensed local IPMs by competition, forming sub-portfolios of shares, bonds and investments in infrastructure projects. A sub-portfolio of government bonds is named as the first test, as the clearest and most liquid asset class: this would check whether managers can run large institutional portfolios within a mandate and risk limits. The size of the assets handed over, the number of managers and the selection criteria, the document says, will be decided by the National Bank after each stage. Uniform competitive procedures for selecting IPMs are set for 2027. Contributors keep the right to voluntarily hand up to 100% of their savings to management.
For those who make no choice, a life-cycle model is proposed: the closer retirement, the less risk in the portfolio. Since 2026 such IPM portfolios are already split by three criteria: regardless of time to retirement, more than three years and more than thirteen years. The next step, the programme says, is to extend the principle to the savings of people who have not chosen a manager, with automatic adaptation of risk to the remaining term. A uniform age-allocation method will be developed for this.
The programme also admits the risks: the historical experience of the accumulative system shows that private managers could put money into assets connected to them by special relations, and this threatened the safety of pension savings. So it proposes stronger requirements on IPMs’ financial stability and risk management, limits and control on investments in securities of related parties, and a division of responsibility among ARDFM, the National Bank, the UAPF, custodians and the IPMs themselves. A custodian is a bank that keeps assets apart from the manager. Already on 4 November contributors to IPMs received the right to choose an investment strategy for pension savings, ARDFM reported.
What it means: Pension money, almost all of which now sits with the state, could become the main source of demand for the capital market: 20–30% of 24 trillion tenge is on the order of 5–7 trillion tenge. This is our calculation; the programme gives no such sum. The main question is how to protect savings once private companies start managing them.
Who benefits: Private managers who would get access to a significant share of pension assets. Companies going public: a large domestic buyer of their securities appears. Contributors, if competition among managers raises returns: the gain is not guaranteed, and the programme admits the risk to the safety of savings.
Background: A mandate is the set of rules within which a manager may invest: permitted instruments, risk, limits. A sub-portfolio is a part of the overall portfolio set aside for a separate strategy.
